It’s an ugly name for one of the most beautiful phenomena you can see in the sky. Crepuscular means occurring or active during twilight. Crepuscular rays are rays of sunlight streaming through clouds that seem to converge on the position of the sun. They can occur anytime during the day, but are probably most common at dawn or dusk; thus, the name. I have been looking for a good example without much luck. Friday evening while Leah and I were looking at some very nice clouds showing something else I had been looking for, I realized we might get crepuscular rays. And we did.

Crepuscular rays

They are faint, but they’re there. A zoomed image shows them a little better.

Zoomed crepuscular rays

I might have been able to emphasize the rays with some manipulation in Elements, but I wanted to keep the image as close as possible to the way it actually looked to the naked eye. And we might have been able to get more dramatic pictures if we could have seen the sunset closer to the horizon. Unfortunately, we can’t actually see the sunset from our deck because the sun goes down behind the mountain. We get good sunrises, but from the deck, the sun disappears pretty early in the evening.

There were some other interesting things going on in the sky Friday, including some I have been waiting to see for a while. I’ll post those later.